If you're paid hourly, your paycheck starts with a number this calculator builds for you: hourly rate x hours per week x weeks per year, which gives a gross annual figure. From there, the math is identical to any salaried employee's: federal income tax applies to your taxable income (gross minus the $16,100 standard deduction for a single filer in 2026), run through seven progressive brackets from 10% up to 37%. FICA (Social Security + Medicare) applies straight to gross wages, with no deduction subtracted first.
Your pay frequency, weekly, biweekly, semimonthly, or monthly, only changes how that annual total is sliced into checks, not the total itself. A biweekly worker gets 26 smaller checks a year; a monthly worker gets 12 bigger ones; the sum after tax is the same either way. Social Security is capped at a $184,500 wage base for 2026, and Medicare has no cap at all, with an Additional Medicare Tax of 0.9% kicking in once wages pass $200,000, employee-side only.
State income tax is optional here rather than baked in, because there's no honest single nationwide number. Select any of the 50 states or DC above to add it: nine states, including Texas, Florida, and Washington, add $0, most states apply a flat rate or their own progressive bracket table, and California or New York City can add another 8-14%+ on top of everything shown here. This assumes straight-time hours throughout, no overtime premium is modeled.
